Now for something quite different. When I was in law school, I wrote a novel to give myself a break from reading cases. I’d carve out a bit of time each day between study sessions to crank out 500 or 1000 words, and then I’d published the results on my blog.

This worked, both in that it motivated me to write consistently, and in that it led to an offer from a small press horror publisher to release the book. The Hole, an apocalyptic horror tale, turned out I think pretty okay for a first novel. (And even got turned into an Audible audiobook, which was quite neat.) But it was also very much a first novel, and if I were writing it again today, I’m confident I could do a lot better.

I’m not writing it again today, though. What I am doing is kicking off my next one. Tribes of the Void is a new serial novel I’m publishing here on my newsletter—and below’s the first chapter.

What’s Tribes of the Void about? Here’s my hopefully intriguing back cover copy:

And now for…

Chapter 1

Waverly Whateley was fifteen when she found out why her mom had gone missing two years ago. The knowledge, as shattering as it was, at least had the silver lining of making her that much more confident in her decision to run away from home.

The crummy part of town you weren’t supposed to go wasn’t always comfortable, and sometimes it filled with noises that hounded sleep because they sounded like things Waverly knew couldn’t be real. But at 2 a.m., alone in that part of town, what you know can’t be real isn’t quite the same as accepting its unreality.

Her place still had electricity, somehow. Kelsey, her best friend (or one of her three best friends, depending on her mood) was always saying how the city government—or any government for that matter—was incompetent, from the guy at the top all the way down to the guy whose job it was to make sure houses nobody was allowed to live weren’t still getting electricity. Electricity meant she could charge her laptop, and charge her phone so she had a hotspot, and that meant freelance gigs online where no one put much effort into checking her age. So thank god for Kelsey Stansfield being mostly right about city government.

The year Waverly learned where her mom went, if you could really call it that, she learned a lot of other stuff, too. It was an odyssey of self-discovery, or something like they’d say in English class, and basically all of it bad. Not to get ahead of things, Wave’s odyssey began, as so many petty troubles had, with Jacob Rigsby. Another, depending on her mood, of her three best friends.

Waverly wasn’t at home. Which is what she’d come to think of the abandoned place as, even if she’d been there all of six weeks. Nor was she in school. She’d still been going, of course, but mostly to keep up appearances. This day she’d played hooky, and so was in the trashy—though she suspected intentionally so—coffee shop just on the edge of the part of town you weren’t supposed to go, because she didn’t feel like school that day, and the coffee shop had wifi, and the bored baristas didn’t ask questions about a clearly too young to be in college teenage girl hanging in the corner on her computer.

It was twenty minutes past dismissal, just enough time for Nadia (her third and final best friend) and Kelsey to make it from the school, if they rushed, and they clearly had, because her coding was interrupted by both of them standing over her table and Kelsey saying, “Rigsby’s gone, Wave.” Looking at her like she needed to do something about it, right now, and Nadia looking at her the same.

“From school?” Waverly said.

“For over a week now,” Nadia said. Which was about how long it’d been since the last time Waverly was there.

Neither of them had a coffee or a tea, and they hadn’t texted before coming, so they must’ve known she’d be here, or strongly suspected, and this news couldn’t wait for anything to be brewed or poured.

Waverly sighed and said, “He’s probably on vacation or whatever. His mom’s always dragging them to visit her sisters, right?”

“Except, Wave,” Kelsey said, pulling out a chair, sitting down, and pushing her laptop closed, “his kid brother’s still at the bus stop in the morning, and Jacob didn’t tell us he was going on vacation.”

“He’d have told us,” Nadia said, taking a seat herself.

They were right. He would have. Not just to keep his friends from worrying about it, but because he told them everything. All the time. Rigsby narrated his life compulsively, a nervous tic Waverly sometimes thought was a way to ground himself, make himself the center of his story because so much of his life was this unstable ground between the typical chaos of what he got up to with them and the hyper control of his parents. Here’s where I am, he’d tell himself by way of telling them. Constantly.

“Did anyone call the cops?” she asked, before realizing it was a dumb question.

Which Kelsey was more than happy to point out. “Those fascists? Even if they got off their asses and looked for him, even if they had the brains to find him, they’d just shoot him the moment he pulled out his phone to tell his mom he’s okay.”

Nadia rolled her eyes. “We don’t want to get him in trouble, Wave. Maybe he just ran away.” Just like they keep Waverly’s own quasi-emancipated minor status on the down-low.

“So is there a plan?” Waverly asked.

“Wave…” Nadia said.

“It’s that you want me to come up with a plan,” Waverly said.

“Rigsby would want you to,” Kelsey said. “You think he’d want one of us to be the one in charge of finding him, if he’s in trouble?”

Waverly opened her laptop again. “I’m going to take notes,” she said. “Or brainstorm. Mind map. whatever. Helps me think.” She pulled up a fresh document, titled it “Of Course He’s Missing,” and said, “Okay, what’ve we got?”

Kelsey said, “Not much.”

“Kind of nothing, really,” Nadia added.

Kelsey continued, “It was—“ He did some mental math. “Eight days ago I’m pretty sure was the last time I heard from him.”

“Heard from him?”

“Got a text. So, yeah, last Tuesday night. Maybe 11 o’clock? I don’t know. It was late, but not super late. Anyway, he texts me, asks if I've heard of…”

“It was that new startup,” Nadia said. “The stealth one.”

Rigsby was always into those, fresh internet companies so fresh they hadn’t formally announced yet, existing more as rumored next projects of famous people who’d already gotten rich elsewhere. He liked to guess what they were, the times he got it right becoming the high points of his day or week. Especially if everyone else was guessing wrong.

“Yeah, it was…” Kelsey trailed off as he dug for his phone, unlocked it, and scrolled through conversations. “BABEL. All caps, at least that’s how Rigsby spelled it.”

“Never heard of it,” Waverly said, thinking of course she hadn’t, otherwise Rigsby wouldn’t have been interested in the first place.

Then she caught a barista staring at them from behind the bar. Probably because Kelsey and Nadia weren’t buying anything, but still it was weird, given how chill this place typically was. Waverly gave her a look—the same one she actually gave Rigsby the last time she saw him on account of how much he’d been irritating her—and the barista dropped her gaze.

“Something up?” Nadia asked, glancing in the direction Waverly had sent her disapproval.

“Nothing,” Waverly said. “But you two gonna hang here for a while, you’ll have to buy something. It’s kind of the rule. So what’s BABEL?”

Kelsey gestured to Nadia that he’d go get them drinks. Nadia nodded and said, “It’s a Rigsby thing.”

“Meaning you have no idea.”

“None.”

“You Google it?” Waverly asked.

Nadia rolled her eyes.

“And got nothing.” Waverly said.

“A domain and a logo, some rumors.”

“Such as?”

“Machine learning. Maybe a new model? That would fit Rigsby.”

Waverly typed “BABEL” and “machine learning(?)” into her document, took a sip of her cold coffee, and said, “Okay, so what now? There’s not much here, and who knows if the text he sent Kelsey is why he’s run off, anyway.”

“If he’s run off,” Nadia said.

“If, sure.”

Kelsey came back, paper cups in hand, and set one down in front of Nadia. He took a seat and said, “Maybe we should think of just cutting Rigsby loose.”

“Is that why you rushed here, begging me for help finding him?” Waverly said. “Because you’ve been thinking it’s time to cut him loose?”

Kelsey sighed and Nadia said, “You know he doesn’t mean it, Wave.”

Kelsey set down his coffee. “Yeah, you know I don’t mean it. But he’s just so much. It’s exhausting. He’s always doing this.”

“Remember when he hopped that bus?” Nadia said.

Waverly did. They’d sent her to get him, because she didn’t have family who’d miss her if she did, so there was no one she’d need to give an excuse to who might then tell Rigsby’s family he’d got on a bus to California so he could try to sneak into an Apple new hardware event. There was no way they let him in, because you need to buy a ticket, and Rigsby didn’t have that kind of money, but he’d thought he could find a way. The plan extended only so far as the bus ticket, though, and he’d ad-lib the rest once he got there.

So Waverly bought a bus ticket herself, and at sixteen made her first cross-country trip, getting to San Francisco just half a day after Rigsby, and he was still at the bus station, browsing his phone for a place to stay and not having any luck. She’d convinced him it was a lost cause, paid for both their tickets home, and done a convincing enough act of telling his parents he’d been over at her place for a multi-night hackathon—which they thought meant actually playing video games—with Kelsey and Nadia and he’d lost track of time.

Rigsby promised to never do anything like that again, at least until he had a car and a credit card, and he honestly hadn’t. He’d been good. So she got where Kelsey was coming from, because Rigsby, much as she loved him, was like their group’s annoying little brother, and, as Kelsey said, it was sometimes exhausting.

“Time he went to California, he told us,” Waverly said. “And he’d have told us this time if he were off on another adventure.”

“Like I said,” Nadia added.

“Right,” Waverly said. “So we have to operate like he’s in trouble, and if he’s not, we can kick his ass once we find him.”

Kelsey sighed again and said, “Where do we start?”

But that barista was watching them again. Across the small interior, which still wasn’t crowded because this place was more of a nighttime scene, and behind the bar, the barista, a skinny woman in maybe her early twenties and who Waverly wasn’t sure she’d seen before today, was staring at her. Not a zoning out, bored at work blank stare, but keen interest. Waverly stared back, jacked up her eyebrows and bulged her eyes in a “Yes, you want something?” rude glance, and the barista broke eye contact and turned away to wipe the snout of the espresso machine.

Nadia was saying something.

“—his house.”

“Sorry, what?” Waverly said.

“Where’d you go, Wave?” Kelsey said.

“Sorry,” she said again.

Nadia said, “We go to his house? Maybe there's something in his room that’ll, like, point us in the right direction.”

“Give us a lead,” Kelsey said.

“How do we get in?” Waverly asked. “If his parents are home, we can’t exactly just knock on the door and say we want to search his room. If they’re not home, the place’ll be locked.”

“I know a way,” Nadia said.

“You know a way?”

“I kind of snuck in once,” Nadia said.

Waverly stared at her, disbelieving. Then actually believing a little, and then laughed. “You snuck in?”

“Just the once.”

“What for?”

Nadia looked down at her coffee. “Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing,” Waverly said. “Okay.”

Kelsey just stared at the two of them, confused, and said, “What do you mean?”

“She means nothing,” Waverly said. And then, to Nadia’s visible relief, pushed forward with what they were actually supposed to be talking about. “So, how do we get in?”

“There’s a tree in his back yard. You can get in because the gate, the one to the alley for the trash, isn’t locked. You don’t even have to climb the fence. Anyway, you climb the tree, but it’s easy, and there’s this branch basically right to his window.”

“Basically?” Kelsey said.

“Well, close enough to jump onto the roof. Which is mostly flat. It’s easy.”

“And the window’s open?” Waverly asked.

“Last time I checked. Or unlocked, at least.”

Kelsey said, “We should do it tomorrow. Blow off school. Or maybe try to do it at lunch if you think we can be fast. His brother won’t be there, his dad’ll be at work. And his mom works too, right?”

“She’s a teacher,” Nadia said, clearly annoyed that Kelsey wouldn’t know this about the mom of one of his best friends. But Rigsby’s mom was old, out of touch, part of the establishment. Kelsey made a point of not knowing details of those people’s lives, unless it was how their actions, or just the ideology they represented, were messing up the world.

“Okay, so she’ll be at school, too,” Kelsey said.

“Do we all go?” Waverly asked. “I mean, I was planning to ditch again, so I don’t have to worry about getting caught getting in or out, and it’s not like my parents will get a call about me missing class.”

That barista was staring again. Nadia had started to say something, but Waverly cut her off. “One second,” she said. “I want to take care of something.”

Nadia and Kelsey watched her close her laptop, stand up, and walk as authoritatively as she could manage across the coffee shop and up to the bar. The barista glanced away from her at the last second, but Waverly wouldn’t let her off the hook. “Hey!” she said. “Hey, you need something? Doesn’t look like you need the table, but you want us to buy more coffee?”

“Sorry,” the barista said, still looking away. The other girl behind the bar was helping a customer and not paying attention to the exchange. 

“We’re good, then?” Waverly said, leaning forward, hands on the countertop. She was aiming for a power stance, as much as she could being quite a bit shorter than most everyone else at the shop, including the offending barista.

“Sorry.” And she turned away, scratching at a dark patch on her cheek.

“I hope so,” Waverly said, and headed to the front of the shop to meet Nadia and Kelsey, who were throwing away their cups.

“What’s that about?” Kelsey asked.

“Weirdo kept staring at me,” Waverly said.

“Which one?”

She pointed.

Nadia said, “She looks kind of sick.”

“She’s something,” Waverly said.

“Places like this always go to rot,” Kelsey said. “Anywhere gets a reputation for not being mean to teens, anywhere that doesn’t treat us like kids or delinquents, and someone comes along and tells them to stop. Can’t let us not be under someone’s thumb at all times.”

“Kelsey…” Nadia put her hand patronizingly on his arm, but he ignored her.

“Gotta keep the hierarchy strong,” he continued, louder, broadening his audience. “You let us congregate, you let us discuss, and we are bound to start seeing the cracks in the edifice. Start noticing the holes in the logic propping it up. Don’t want us imagining a better world. They particularly don’t want us making plans to achieve it. It’s not about disruptive teens, it’s about shoring up ideology.”

“Kelsey, we gotta go,” Waverly said, her hand on his arm now, too, and pulling him towards the door. “You can find another soapbox outside. Or start another blog.”

But that wasn’t the only reason she wanted to go. That barista was staring again, and maybe that meant they weren’t welcome here anymore, but the stare also had Waverly on edge for reasons beyond losing her favorite working spot. Because the look she was getting was like that barista knew her, and while Waverly was pretty sure she didn’t, maybe she does? The feeling of the familiar was too strong, even if entirely inexplicable. Whatever was going on, Waverly wanted away from it. Right now.

She succeeded in getting Kelsey outside, where he dropped the tirade, deprived of subjects to preach to. Nadia looked as relieved as Waverly to be out of there, though for different reasons, and said, “I need to get home, guys. Meet you tomorrow at that corner near Rigsby’s? 11:30?”

They agreed to meet then. Waverly left them, and walked back home, that anxious feeling waning, but still there, even when she was inside and alone.